The Yale Dance Theater Pilot Program has nothing to do with flying planes, but it will exhibit some tricky lift-offs Saturday afternoon in Yale’s Stiles-Morse Crescent Theater (19 Tower Parkway, New Haven).
The event is not a full-fledged dance concert but an intriguing “lecture/demonstration” regarding the seven-member undergrad troupe’s attempt to reconstruct Twyla Tharp’s legendary 1971 dance Eight Jelly Rolls. (The photo here is of the original Tharp company premiere.) Eight Jelly Rolls was set to the seminal jazz strains of Jelly Roll Morton (who was later to have a Broadway musical, Jelly’s Last Jam, based on his life) and reportedly also inspired by the silent film clowning of Buster Keaton. It’s traditionally been danced by groups of three to six women, but is more about its flexible modern dance/ballet crossover style than about any strict structural framework. Eight Jelly Rolls was Tharp’s first attempt at synthesizing jazz and dance, and led to a slew of other ambitious dances directly inspired by American popular music. Less than a decade later, she was known for such diverse choreographic projects as the movies Hair and Amadeus and the musical Singing in the Rain. In recent years, Tharp has set dances to the Billy Joel and Frank Sinatra catalogues. The originality of her interpretations is what continues to distinguish her work, and it all started with Eight Jelly Rolls. Details on the Yale project here.